The sound of you saying goodbye to her she remembers.
The clearest memory, an arrow piercing right through her,
Her heart on a stick.
Hanging loose and abandoned outside of her organism.
The brain, the stuffed wardrobe, fainting, a massive leak.
Disintegrating, falling down into loneliness.
Oh it was there before, has never left in fact, this, a reawakening of horrid senses.
Of truth. Look at it. In the gut it resides.
He did not look back. She was on her knees, guttered, disoriented.
Nothing mattered, not weather, not alterations.
She grew all grey on that street.
Hugging herself not to break into pieces, out there, for everyone to see.
He always found the right words to tear her apart.
The ones to turn a smile into howling.
An accomplishment into failure.
He is the master of weather around her.
She can hear his heels on the frozen floor, he is colder, he is harder.
From the back of his head she can sense his smile, his rotten pride.
He knows how to make them all shiver.
That’s when he walks away and is congratulated, a free man.
As clapping hands meet clapping hands,
And nasty fingers lick nasty fingers, raised in the absence of affection and intimacy,
She, whose knees are shattered, whose heart has been reduced to a bone,
Stands up and loves herself enough to leave that street behind, him,
Taking everything with her that truly matters, her.
“Ritratto di Pauline Ménard-Dorian” by Eugène Carrière (1849-1906)
Croque-Melpomene 